Introduction to Working on the ASC Clusters

Discover how to harness Austria’s most powerful supercomputers! This hands-on course guides you from your first steps on the ASC clusters to efficiently running software using their queuing system – perfect for beginners and intermediate users alike.

In this course we will help you getting started on the ASC clusters, Austria's most powerful supercomputers. We'll focus on using the ASC clusters and especially their queuing system efficiently.

With running and developing software on a supercomputer there are many similarities and fewer but crucial differences compared to your desktop PC. Focusing on hands-on teaching throughout the course, you will immediately try out what you've heard and adapt it to your own needs.

This course is from beginners level (the first steps on a supercomputer) to intermediate level (some experience on the ASC systems or any other computing cluster) and equally relevant to those who will merely be running existing software as to those who will develop scientific codes (however, without actually teaching supercomputer programming – if you would like to learn parallel programming, please refer to our MPI, OpenMP, or CUDA courses).

Agenda & Content

For a detailed timetable and additional information, please see Agenda & Content in the left menu.

Target audience, eligibility & prices

This course is for our new users who would like to get onboarded on the ASC systems.

This course is open and free of charge for users (or soon to be users) of the ASC systems only.

Entry level & prerequisites

Basic – no previous knowledge is required for this course.

Participants should know how to login to a remote Linux machine and know the basics about working on the Linux command line. Otherwise please take our ASC-Linux course prior to this course.

Course format

This course will be delivered as a LIVE ONLINE COURSE (using Zoom).

Hands-on labs

All participants will get a temporary user account on one of the ASC systems to do the hands-on labs.

You will use your own laptop or workstation to connect to ASC and do the hands-on exercises. If you use Windows please install the following software packages prior to the course: PuTTY and FileZilla or winscp.

Accepted participants will be contacted a few days before the course and asked to do a short pre-assignment that has to be completed before the course starts.

Lecturers

Claudia Blaas-Schenner (ASC Research Center, TU Wien)       
Dr. Claudia Blaas-Schenner is passionate about supercomputing / High-Performance computing (HPC) and has been at the forefront of the field for over 30 years. She founded and directs the training program at Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), the Austrian national supercomputing center, and is recognized for her expertise in parallel computing and the Message-Passing Interface (MPI), serving as a chapter chair for Terms and Convention in the MPI Forum, which standardizes MPI. Her academic background is in Computational Materials Science and she holds a PhD in Technical Physics from TU Wien. Claudia is deeply engaged in various large-scale European projects that advance HPC and AI, with a particular focus on addressing current needs in training and education.

Siegfried Höfinger (ASC Research Center, TU Wien)       
Dr. Siegfried Höfinger is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) specialist and instructor focusing on efficient use of Austria's leading supercomputing infrastructure. He teaches researchers and practitioners how to run and optimize scientific applications on the large-scale ASC clusters, with a strong emphasis on practical hands-on workflows and energy aware HPC usage. Siegfried focuses on GPU programming and he teaches how to offload computationally intensive kernels from CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs, exploit massive thread-level parallelism, and use CUDA libraries like cuBLAS and cuSOLVER to speed up linear algebra and other numeric routines.

Language

English

Date, time, and location

23.03.2026, 09:00 – 17:00 CET, LIVE ONLINE COURSE (using Zoom)

Registration

Registration is required, the registration form can be found on top of this page in the menu on the left.

Please register with your official institutional email address to prove your affiliation.

You will get an automatic confirmation via email (subject starting with "[Indico] Registration"), please check your Spam/Junk folders.

Following your successful registration, you will receive further information a few days before the course.

Please do not hesitate to contact us at training@asc.ac.at if you have any questions.

Waitinglist

After the number of registrations has reached its maximum or the registration form has been closed, you may want to send us an email (training@asc.ac.at) stating that you are interested to be put on the waiting list (vacancies may occur due to cancelations, etc.).

To be able to do the hands-on labs on the ASC systems please provide your full international mobile-phone number for the two-factor authentication required to login to the ASC systems.

Modification, withdrawal & no-show policy

Your registration is binding. Please only register for the course if you are really going to attend.

You can update your registration data or withdraw your registration anytime before the registration form has been closed via the link "Manage my registration" which you can find at the bottom of your automatic email confirmation (subject starting with "[Indico] Registration").

Alternatively, or after the registration form has been closed, please inform us about your cancelation or any change in your registration data (especially your mobile-phone number) via email (training@asc.ac.at).

No-show policy: If you do not cancel and do not show up at the course you will be blacklisted and excluded from future training events.

Organizers

This course is organized by Austrian Scientific Computing ASC (aka ASC Research Center, TU Wien).